A big welcome to Project codeX!
We hope that you will enjoy this journey with us and that you will learn and apply lots of new skills in the process. Arriving at codeX you might wonder where the class rooms are? There are none! It is just you, your fellow coders, us your mentors and the BIG world wide web.
This introduction assumes that you have completed both these courses in Codecademy:
If you haven't completed them yet it's not a train smash! Just complete them before you go any further.
After completing all those courses in Codecademy you must be feeling quite chuffed with yourself. And with good reason! You put in the hours, you argued your way through the challenges and you have the badges to show for it. Now we are going to remove the side wheels, so things might start feeling a bit unstable. You will be unsure of what code to use where, but this is all pretty normal.
Just to prove to you that you are not alone in this, have a look at Why Learning to Code is So Damn Hard (What every beginner absolutely needs to know about the journey ahead). It's quite a long, but interesting, read.
Now you know that you are not alone let's get going.
We would like you to register for a few online tools that we will be using at codeX.
Please register and familiarise yourself with:
You should spend about 10 mins on each site, seeing what each does and checking out the different features.
Next steps are to get you going with a few tools. Work your way through each of these exercises: they're challenging but rewarding!
So far most of the code you have written might have been inside of Codecademy. That's about to change!
In reality most software is written in text editors or a more advanced text editor called an Integrated Development Environment (or IDE for short). We will use a text editor called Sublime Text and later you will be introduced to an IDE called Eclipse.
- Learn how to find problems in your code using Debugging & Tools
- Let's get going and do some coding now
Now head over to 53 functions and write some functions.
So far all the JavaScript that you've written was running inside of the web browser. By using Node.js (or Node just for short) you can run JavaScript programs from the terminal, without the need for a web browser. This allows you to use JavaScript to write some programs that don't depend on the web browser, such as accessing data in a database. Soon we will be using it to program web servers and even to do some robotics.